Over the internet you can find 100s of free tools to help make your business life easier, and here at DOWO we take full advantage of them. We use loads of free tools to help us manage our day, monitor channels, create campaigns and generally make life easier.
Most of the free tools we use can be downloaded by anyone and you can use them in the day-to-day running of your business to keep things ticking over smoothly. We started on the free versions of all of these products (although loved some so much we upgraded to the pro versions to get even more functionality).
We’d recommend giving tools a go, and if they don’t fit your business to find another one, rather than going straight into the paid for versions (there are loads more great tools out there which didn’t work for us for various reasons too)
Here are some of our favourite tools that we use day in and day out here at DOWO:
Slack – This is a great tool for inter-communication within your team. Rather than sending lots of emails, we can easily share files, give updates, and easily catch up when we’re out of the office. We’ve got separate channels for specific projects, and the ability to keep notes by sending updates to yourself!
Asana – Manage your projects and track the progress of each of your team’s assignments with this handy app. You can stay on top of your responsibilities and bring accountability into your team.
HubSpot – We use HubSpot CRM to track all of our customer interactions in one place. Gathering insights on each lead, monitoring their progress and keeping everything organised in one place. This means the team can easily stay updated with where our leads are upto, and provides us with our monthly dashboard.
MailChimp – Sending mailshots and designing e-marketing campaigns is super easy with MailChimp, and at DOWO we can even help you integrate your website contact forms directly into Mailchimp for Newsletter Signups. It’ll walk you through sending beautiful emails that can send more personalised emails with ease too.
Hootsuite – For social media management, Hootsuite is one of the best free tools out there for keeping on top of your social channels, and posting updates to multiple platforms from a single webpage. It lets you monitor what’s going on from a single dashboard, and schedule posts, so you can keep your social media updated.
Google Analytics – Gathering data and being able to determine what’s working in your marketing plan and gain insights about your web traffic is essential for business growth. Google Analytics allows you to keep an eye on how your website is performing and measure the success of your advertising ROI. If you need help interpreting any of the data give us a shout here at DOWO, and we’ll be happy to help.
WordPress – We love WordPress at DOWO (we’ve even blogged about it before). There are loads of ready-made website designs for you to choose from, with 100,000s of plugins available to add additional functionality. 20% of the web now uses WordPress, and it provides much more that just a blog – building more complex websites can be achieved, and you can always get in touch with our team at DOWO if you need any assistance (it’s what we do!).
FreeImages – This is a fantastic free resource with thousands of stock photos, free from copyright violations that you can use in your marketing campaigns. It’s got pretty much anything, so search through and chances are, you’ll find what you’re looking for. It’s cost effective and means you don’t have to spend money on your own photography.
Dropbox/Google Drive – Both of these applications are essential for anyone running a business. You can easily keep all of your files in one place and access them anywhere, as well as sharing files with clients and team members.